For example, in response to my post where I point out that the richest Americans have had their taxes cut by 40 percent in my lifetime compared to about 2 or 3 per cent for the rest of us, a reader supplies this:

According to an August 1986 CBO report, in 1980 the top one percent paid 19.1 percent of personal income taxes and the top marginal tax rate on individual income was 70 percent. Today the top rate is 35 percent and the top one percent paid 36.7 percent of the tax.

In other words, while the top marginal tax rate may have been higher in 1968 and in 1980 (before the Reagan or Bush Tax cuts) but top earners are paying a larger share of individual income taxes now.

This is used as evidence to show that high income earners are getting ripped off and that the rest of us Joe Sixpack folks should really shut up about how good we have it. But that argument, no matter how often it is argued by conservatives and Republicans, makes absolutely no sense.

If the total tax bite has remained the same, and the high income group has seen their taxes cut by 40 percent, then how can it be that the higher income people are paying a greater share of the whole?

The answer is simple - you throw a couple of oranges in the comparison and it looks a lot different. Or, to be more accurate, you choose your statistics very carefully.

If we compare 1986 to 2004, the number of returns that qualified as "the top 1%" increased from 1.02 million to 1.30 million. That alone will conflate the amount of income that these people claim.

If you look at how much income is needed to get into that group, it has risen (in inflation-adjusted real dollars) from $118,818 to $328,049. The total adjusted gross income (again, inflation-adjusted real dollars) for that group rose from $285 billion to $1.306 trillion. The total share of income for which they accounted rose from 11.3 percent to 19 percent. That's a 7.7 percent increase.

The amount of income tax they paid rose from $94.491 billion to $306.9 billion. Their share of total taxes increased only 3.2 percent. That is a net reduction of taxation no matter how it is sliced. That's a 33 percent effective tax rate in the first case and 23.5 percent in the second. If you're keeping score, this means that the very high income earners increased their share of the total income in America by 7.7 percent and paid 9.5 percent less tax.

Meanwhile, the tax rate for the top 50 percent of tax payers fell less than 3 percent, from 16.3 percent to 13.5 percent, while their share of the income rose from 83 percent to 86 percent.

You don't have to be a math genius to see that the top 1percent has benefited far more than the rest of us. Averaging a large gain for a small subset over a much larger group obscures the fact that it is that subset to which the majority of gains have been realized.

It doesn't matter if they are paying a greater share of the income tax - they have the greater share of the money.

There is literally no way to create a system where this is not true. Even in a flat tax the wealthy will pay the bulk of the taxes - because they have the bulk of the money. The talk of the percentage of taxes they pay only serves to obfuscate the reality that the rich are not only getting richer, they are getting richer at a far higher rate than the rest of us can hang onto our earnings.

The discussion really shouldn't be about what we did spend, but about what we should have spent and chose not to. In order to give Paris Hilton and her cohorts a huge tax cut, the rest of us got by with 2 or 3 percent cuts. In return for allowing them to keep more money, we saw school funding fall behind school costs, our highways, bridges, and flood control infrastructure age and decay, and our total debt reach record after record after record.

The cost of those cuts accumulates at an ever-steepening rate on the middle class. The very poor are caught by our social safety net and spared the full effect of the cuts, despite the fact that the threads that hold it have been targeted for unraveling. The benefits accrue almost entirely to the very wealthy. There is little, if any, evidence to show that the infamous trickle has made it down to the bulk of society. Instead, it has been dammed up to create an even higher barrier and a more stratified society.

As I said, I'm more than willing to give up the 2 percent tax cut I've been granted if those making a million bucks a year or more will give up half of the 40 percent tax cut they've received in my lifetime.

Honestly, if they haven't saved enough millions by this time, it seems unlikely that they will in the future.